


the hard edge of intention

by Lunaurelle



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Pre-Canon, general nohrian unpleasantries, imagnings on niles's past, loosely vignette style, niles flirts with several things including death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:14:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22285423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunaurelle/pseuds/Lunaurelle
Summary: "Maybe I tire of fighting," Zero said. He knew a loss over a win, too; he'd achieved the former the moment his knee had hit the stone flooring. He would have shrugged, if there hadn't been vines digging into his shoulder. It didn't feel like how staring death in the face ought to."If you are that eager to let that life slip away, then I can think of a much better use for it."--A look at Niles pre-canon, including the sort of person he might have been, and the sort of people that might have been around him.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	the hard edge of intention

**Author's Note:**

> Niles is a very fun character with facets I love to dig into. This is my exploration of some of them. Big shoutout and thank you to @darkangelmya; without her interpretation of Leo, my own interpretation of Niles would be sorely laking. She also provided Leo's dialogue, for which I was very excited to play off of. Thanks for reading!

The shake in his hands was true.

It didn’t come with weakness, as it would if he hadn’t eaten. He’d been fed for weeks, now. There was always food in the kitchens, always food in Lord Leo’s chambers, always food. He was only hungry sometimes, and never until it crushed his abdomen down. There was always food, and sometimes never enough, because Niles could still count his ribs in the mirror when he buttoned his shirt. He’d remarked upon the fact, and Lord Leo had simply instructed him to ask for food as he pleased. Niles still didn’t believe it.

It didn’t come with blood loss, like it had weeks ago. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been whole, without skin cracked from the dry winter chill or scuffs on his hands. Four sessions with the healer saw the biting gash in the back of his leg mended, the lesser scratches and scrapes on his arms and hands mended pristine, and his new cloak meant he felt the cold like a memory instead of anything real and dangerous. He slept inside. He stoked the fire as high as he wanted. He was still waiting to wake up. 

\--

They took the entrance that led a winding path nearly to the castle gardens. Ice crunched beneath their footsteps, no matter how gingerly they tread. Glint walked ahead, Zero at his shoulder. It was several hours after sundown, bitterly cold, and they'd been a day without food. Glint had offered sips out of a flask of decent wine; Zero felt it rolling in his stomach at the approach. 

Get in. Find him. Spread out. Get out. It sounded so simple at a breath, but involved so much scrabbling in the dark. 

Their first kill was a pair of guards. Two of Glint's friends did away with them while they sneaked in, Zero taking the lead up a winding staircase. By the time they'd reached the secondary hallway on the third floor, they'd killed another guard. Or rather, Zero had. His arrow, his shot, his mark on the scene. Glint kissed him on the cheek for it and told him his skin was cold. His hand was clammy on the grip of his bow. The castle had walls to keep the wind out, but it felt no different than the grounds. 

"This is mad, you know?" Zero said, a laugh rolling off his heaving breath. His head was light, whether from exertion or disbelief or mirth, he didn't know. He limped, but barely felt the still-curling burn on his calf. He hadn’t seen, exactly, the spell that had done it; it had rushed past his blindspot, Zero looking down in time to note the char of fabric around it and little else. "I can't believe we even got in."

"Have a little faith in me, gods," Glint said. He stalled them around one corner and shouldered Zero towards the wall. It was a familiar movement that Zero gave into, though not without reflexive tension. Glint pulled a scrap of cloth from his pocket. "Do something about that, before you bleed a trail."

"I'm burned, you know."

"You're bleeding, anyway."

He was, somehow. Magic. Blast. Zero stooped to one knee and found his hands shaking violently. He laughed again. "This is all your fault."

"Stop wagging that tongue and hurry."

Zero wound the cloth and tied it quick. He had to take Glint's hand to stand. 

"Hey," said their third. He took a very hushed voice. "There's a big set of double doors, ahead. Interested?"

The room was dim when they opened it, illuminated by a set of candles on a desk. Bookshelves emerged from the flickering shadows, nearly floor to ceiling in height. Zero took a step forward and felt like he'd gone through the floor. His vision flickered dark, startling and black, and he barely held his arrow. Glint swore behind them, and the third in front of them hit his knee when he fell. The air hung like fog, thick and bearing down. Saturated in it was the telltale buzz of magic that washed over Zero with the grace of cut glass. When Zero's vision came back, he saw a blond boy and a book.

"Well, well," Glint said. He swung the door inward and walked with it as far as he could, using it like a shield. "That's lucky, isn't it? You're the little princeling. We've been just dying to meet you."

 _Shut up_ , Zero thought. The place for taunting was in an alley surrounded by several of your fellows, not in the castle surrounded by guards. Zero aimed at the prince's book with shaking hands and let loose and arrow; it sailed at half speed, the spell heavy and thick in the air, and fell at his feet.

"You should be honoured,” said the prince. “I would commend you for making it this far into the castle. A pity, then, that you won't be leaving it."

Zero laughed. It was the only thing he could think to do. They'd actually made it, impossibly; but he didn't doubt the lad's words a bit. They were going to die here. His head was light, or heavy, his vision a narrow oval, his limbs shaking. His leg burned a handspan around his calf and knee.

Glint lunged forward, intending the skewer the boy. It would have been, perhaps, more encouraging had there not been power emanating from the boy in a way that made him seem like the sort of mage that could rip their skin off their bones with a word and a look. Deep power, not flashy power. It made Zero's neck prick with unease and his stomach twist through the wine.

In a heartbeat, Glint fell upwards, which was wrong. Purple-dark energy coiled around the prince’s hand, the tether leading back towards that book. The moment stretched long, and sped twice as fast as normal when Glint slammed into the cold stone floor. There was a crack like ice breaking, followed by the metallic clatter of a sword against stone, hammer-on-anvil sharp and resounding. Behind him, the sound of shuffling armor faded in from the background. Zero licked dry lips and tested his injured leg--it hurt, now, the knee shaking with his weight. 

"I told him I wanted out of this alive," their third said. 

"No one's stopping you," Zero snapped. Except the guards. Except the labyrinth hallways. Except Glint, on the ground before a mage with a newly found taste for violence shining bright in his eyes. Glint's thin shoulders twitched up--apparently the fall hadn't cracked his skull entirely open. He scraped himself up, uneven on his feet, and backpedaled. His eyes had narrowed to dagger slits, bright blood streaming down the side of his face and matting up his hair. His fine cheekbone was scraped raw, and bruising mottled his chin. He spat blood. He looked like an image out of a grotesque painting. _Nohrian Man in Crimson._

"Cover me, Zero!" he said.

He'd had more than enough of Glint's delusions. Was about to turn and run, too, because at least with three of them, they could burst through the guards, find a window to break, and cut themselves on the glass before falling. Maybe they'd get to lick their wounds in a miserable hollow and die in the cold evening frost ten years ahead of schedule, if they were lucky.

Glint's blade flashed as he passed Zero by. 

"You'd slow us," Glint said viciously. "Thanks for volunteering."

New pain burst behind Zero's knee, just above the crease, above the burn. He gasped in a curse as the leg buckled sharply beneath him, stinging, urgent, pulling. Hot blood streamed down his leg. He knew it was deep as clearly as he knew Glint had broken their contract.

"Selfish asshole," Zero said. He tried to turn, to aim the arrow at Glint's narrow back, but he crashed out sideways instead, the knee unable to hold his weight. Stone flooring dug into his knee and elbow, and Zero snarled in pain. Footsteps receded, armor clashed, and Zero wasn't sure who was dying and who was fleeing. His vision was closing again. He tasted bile in the back of his throat, aching and hot like the wound spilling out his thin blood and the last of the chance he had to flee.

\--

The shake in his hands didn’t come with fear. Niles had forsaken fear a long time ago. Fear was an open wound waiting. 

If not hunger nor poor constitution nor fear held his mind, there was no reason for Niles to shake as he descended the uneven stone steps. Krackenburg’s cells were worse than the rumors. He thought they might be colder than the streets at night. There was ice at the corners even though there was nowhere for snowmelt to pool. Though sconces kept the darkness out, it was hard to call the pale green cast emitted from magelight light, even if the name implied it. The dark, or the lack of light, or the eeriness of the place, was also not enough to make Niles’s hands shake. The darkness had long been his ally. 

The stairs ran out around the time Niles ran out of reasons why he shouldn’t have been unnerved. Lingering in the shadows at the entrance of the cells, Niles listened to Glint curse a clumsy, ire-filled river that hit like it came from miles above him. Outside, Lord Leo waited for his report. Finding Glint had been easy. It wasn’t even Niles that had done it. Niles had given the information to Leo, who’d given it to someone, and they’d brought Glint back. It was the first of many exercises Niles expected to endure to maintain his place here. Forsake one colleague to gain another. As it was, in Nohr. He’d done it before. There was no reason to hesitate over it now.

Face Lord Leo, or face Glint. Niles wanted neither. He writhed under his name and his place and tilted his head until it hit the wall. It wasn’t the first wound he’d gotten on Glint’s behalf. Far from it. He remembered the true first, and it seemed such a small thing in hindsight.

\--

In a dirty snowdrift at the corner of Waterfaire and Birch, Zero curled over his wound and snapped his teeth down on the sound trying to crawl out of his throat. He crouched, feeling half-numb through the limbs. Ice and brick leeched the heat out of his back, but he pressed into them as if they might give up warmth. Blood dripped from his wrist and forearm, landing pit pat in the snow. The cut ran lengthwise from the crease of his elbow towards his wrist, and it bled fast. 

“That sure was nasty, huh?” Coming alongside Zero, Glint adopted his own crouch and paired it with a grin. He smiled in the way only one who wasn’t doing the bleeding could. His teeth were white, but there was a gap between the sharpest one and its neighbor on Glint’s left. Another was chipped. It wasn’t hard to imagine why. 

Zero spat to the side. “You owe me,” he hissed. 

“Consider this part of your payment.” Glint pulled his flask and matched Zero’s posture, folding in one knee. He held out a hand towards Zero's injury. “Let’s get this over with, before you make more of a mess.”

“Now you’re going to get bloody?”

“Just for you, too.”

\--

Niles stretched his leg, feeling three-week-old scar tissue tug. Glint’s last gift to him was healed enough to walk without limping. That would have to do; though, he suspected even coming back as a ghost wouldn’t be enough to make Glint show his surprise. They were too weary for that. 

Still, there was satisfaction in walking in front of Glint as if he’d never been injured in the first place. Niles let his steps click with the heels of his new boots and watched his shadow precede him into the cellblock. The man waiting for him was winter-hollow through the eyes and cheeks. His tawny hair was dull with street filth and blood. His stolen clothes were torn in conspicuous places, off-color where stains were ground in. The man waiting for him did not look like the sort to rally those around him into action. He just looked dangerous and tired.

“I heard you were coming,” Glint said. His voice was slick, water poured on the cobblestones before a deep freeze. Glint pressed against the bars like they were someone’s body. “I should have known they couldn’t kill you. Look at you.”

It was hard to make envy and adoration share. Glint managed it when he met Niles’s gaze. He nodded, like he wanted Niles to lean in to hear a whisper. In that moment, Niles was the one feeling like he was seeing a ghost. Green-grey mage light didn’t flatter anyone. Neither did imprisonment. 

Niles supposed that was what he’d looked like, too.

—

The crows scattered when Zero nearly bit his tongue in half. They escaped the dense shadows of the alleyway towards a sky just as grey and unpleasant. Zero threw his head back and wrenched his arm away from the alcohol in Glint’s hand. Diluted blood painted pink accents into the snow with the brown-red. The whole thing smeared a moment later, when Zero shoved himself into the very corner of the alley with so much force he almost winded himself. It put maybe three feet between him and Glint, and that many more between Zero and the mouth of the alleyway. No one passed by. 

Glint didn’t bother to hide the smug twist in his mouth. “Don’t like it so much as you thought, do you.”

Zero breathed ragged. “Shut up,” he said, clutching his throbbing arm to his chest. The remains of the alcohol bit into the wound. The scent of it caught in the back of his throat. He didn’t blink. He bared his teeth and ducked his head, keeping his bad eye down and marking exits with his remaining field of vision.

“Stupidity will lose you the limb.” Glint rolled his eyes. “Come here.”

“Oh, if I were stupid, I would have died years ago,” Zero said, his voice high and taunting. The moment between them was a frozen lake. Too much weight in a certain direction would crack it. Anything sudden would sink. 

“I guess you would have, wouldn’t you?” Glint chuckled. “Fine, refuse my generosity if you wish.”

Zero said, “Generosity? We made a deal, not contingency for injury. You promised better than this.”

“You just love to cut me down,” Glint said. “Zero. Come on, let me."

Zero knew he was being stupid. He also knew he wasn’t going to take another hit of astringent into the wound. “Don’t touch me.”

The flask disappeared back into Glint’s pocket. The smell of it lingered in the alleyway between them. Glint stood, then, facing him, and Zero scrambled to his feet with a low, desperate sound.

“Hush,” Glint said like a lullaby. “You don’t have to tear my throat out. We’ll go back."

—

Glint had not changed. He was just as comfortable and just as infuriating as if they were sitting around a trash fire passing a diluted flask between them and pretending to be drunk and warm. 

“Am I to hear more madness from you?” Niles said, tipping his shoulder towards Glint’s. The words came easily.

“Madness would mean I couldn’t win. I’m just a big thinker.” Glint slipped his arms through the bars and folded his hands around them. “It wouldn’t be so hard to turn this around.”

Niles said nothing. He knew selfishness, especially when it was trying to be something else. Niles was selfish. That was why he had the clothes, the food, the position. At least he was up front about it.

Glint was selfish, too, but he made it sound grandiose and possible. That was why he hurt people. He was exactly the person Lord Leo had expected from a group of upstarts. Niles wasn’t. Glint had never quite known that. Niles hadn’t cared, before.

“I really did think you were going to die. I was all torn up about it, too.” Glint flicked the edge of Niles’s cloak.

“I believe that,” Niles said, flat and obstinate.

Glint cut him that annoyed look. The one that meant he was sick of hearing Niles talk. “I can work this to our advantage,” Glint said. “If I’d known your luck was this good, I would have bet on this in the first place.”

“You really think so?” Niles said, leaning in.

Glint didn’t know anything Niles hadn’t already told Leo. That was not the point.

The point was for Niles to lean his flesh into the iron brand of Lord Leo’s power and never forget it. 

\--

Leo had known him for a full six seconds, and known him better than Glint.

The vines were heavy and wholly unnatural, growing from stone as if it were the best soil. They smelled of earth and green and something like ozone. He couldn't draw a full breath with them around his chest. Zero tugged an arm and found no elasticity in them. Too late to reach for a dagger and repay himself for his own foolishness. He didn't expect a princeling of Nohr to have anything in mind other than cruelties. The pressure digging against the burn and laceration on his leg were prelude enough of what was to come. That was fair; it would be an end to Zero's life appropriate as its beginning and middle. 

"It would seem your friends think none too highly of you," the prince said.

Zero had known from the get-go this was a possible--and likely--outcome. Like any of Glint's schemes, life and limb were advertised risks. Zero hoped the man got whatever came to him in the quick minutes to come. Time to pay up, for all of them. This mistake would cost much more than Zero's other eye. The surprise was hearing what sprang from the prince's lips. It drew a thin laugh out of Zero's aching throat. 

"Not friends." Zero should have stopped there, but the rest of his trailing thought streamed madly past his lips. His voice was cracked and quiet, but he filled it with as much teasing as he could scrape up. "Unless your friends are the kind to hurt you--perhaps that's the sort of thing that interests you. I won't presume."

He was going to die. Perhaps he could goad the princeling into hastening the process. The vines held Zero in an awkward crouch, his bad leg throbbing and folded beneath him. Zero's eye tightened in pain. His other leg splayed to the side at an angle that, with the pressure of magic, made his tendons ache dully. His bow was tangled up in the vines inches from his hands, which were going pale at the fingertips and wrapped thoroughly in rough green. He thought there might be a thorn poking into his wrist.

“What am I to do with you?” the prince said, with a noble’s disregard for Zero’s jabs.

Zero glared up with a grimace. He knew how this game went. He'd played it himself, before, though never with restraints quite like this. For a young mage, the haughty look belonged on someone who had done this before, just like Zero. Pain was familiar. Questions were standard. The lightheaded loss of consciousness would be a blessing, if it came. A mage didn't even need to get his hands dirty stringing up his prey. 

"Break me into a hundred pieces?" Zero said, with the fevered air of suggestion. That might be quickest. There was no knife at his throat, just the reminder of power twined around his body. A mind that could conjure such power surely had an array of torture and play that vastly outstripped what Zero could come up with holding a blade to skin. "Raise me again, from the dead, to repeat the process? I don't pretend to know how your minds work--would you rip my heart from my chest still beating?"

If he came back Faceless, would he remember being Zero? Would he remember pain, each time, or would it be black and quiet, for once?

"Rather peculiar suggestions." Amusement faded from the prince’s features, a brief flicker of curiosity seeded in its place. "It would seem to me that all those end with you dead."

"All roads lead to it, anyway," Zero said. "You don't have to worry about breaking my heart by breaking the news. I expected as much." Every day that death didn't come was its own little surprise. 

Maybe part of him longed for it, that which had so far eluded him. He'd known plenty of people for whom that was true. 

In the stillness, his body couldn't keep up the high alert Zero had entered the premises with. The sounds of battle were long gone from the back of the room. No one had come to check on this child--mage though he was--despite the unholy noise and the swell of magic that Zero still felt like phantom hands picking along his skin. It seemed altogether very appropriate: the castle halls were no kinder to an individual than the streets were. Fend for yourself: that was the decree of Nohr. There was no use in planning what he'd do to Glint if he ever saw him again. Glint would go about business as usual. Zero wouldn't. Moving on.

Adrenaline faded fast, leaving the familiar cold that had less to do with Nohr's chill and more to do with the profound hollowness in Zero's stomach. It was lucky he was bound: it would keep the shake out of his hands, for a while.

"You don't intend to fight for it? Your life?" Any trace of contemplation or amusement faded out of Leo’s voice. 

"You'd like that, hm? To see me beg?" Zero lifted his chin, well-aware of how exposed he left his throat. If the boy expected a drawn-out plea for his last breaths, a struggle against the vines, a futile move to stand, Zero would be happy to rob him of petty satisfaction. That much he had strength for. His mouth split in a grin. "I suppose I am already on my knees."

He wasn't sure what the remark would cost him. The boy would need to collect quickly, before all the blood Zero had to offer ended up on the floor, instead.

"Merely curious.” The prince smirked. That was odd. “Most have something in their lives worth fighting to keep it. Family, a companion, riches, pride...many names, but they reduce men to the same in the end: pitiful and groveling. But not you. You've not only accepted it, you've practically asked for death."

"Maybe I tire of fighting," Zero said. He knew a loss over a win, too; he'd achieved the former the moment his knee had hit the stone flooring. He would have shrugged, if there hadn't been vines digging into his shoulder. It didn't feel like how staring death in the face ought to.

"If you are that eager to let that life slip away, then I can think of a much better use for it."

\--

Niles felt clear-headed when he grabbed Glint by the collar and wrenched him forward until his face hit the bars. The sound was metal and hard and harmonized with the terrible little gasp Glint made. Niles shoved Glint back, twisted the key in the lock, and let himself into the cell.

It was for Lord Leo, so it was either more or less selfish than what Glint wanted out of the whole thing. 

“Listen. Very carefully.” Niles metered out the words in the space between the ringing. He stepped down on Glint’s hand to pin him, and crouched low. “I want to hear all about that little idea of yours. I want to hear it until you’re hoarse. And if I like what I hear, maybe you won’t die.”

—

Zero bandaged the wound while Glint watched from across the little fire. It still stung.

Their shelter was in the yard of an abandoned building. Half a shed and a sad, bowing tree were better than camping on a rooftop or stealing scant hours of sleep in alleys before someone chased him off. It didn’t belong to either of them; one of Glint’s contacts kept it, which meant Glint had worked for his share of it.

“There you are, disparaging my hospitality,” Glint said. He walked up to Zero’s good side and dropped the blanket onto his knee. “I’d have done it for you with two hands.”

“I’m better with one than you are with two,” Zero said. The blanket was more of a tarp, but it kept the wet off. They were going to run out of kindling before the night was up. He paused in what he was doing long enough to pull it across his knees. 

“Do you want a drink?” Glint said, his flask reappearing. He unscrewed the top and took a mouthful, then tilted it towards Zero. 

“My hands are busy,” Zero said, winding the thin cloth. His fingers were cold at the tips, slower than he’d like. The fire didn’t seem quite to reach them. 

“You just want me to hold the flask for you,” Glint said, scoffing.

“Since you ever so kindly offered.”

“You’re picky tonight.” 

“I get to be.” He waved his arm like a flag. 

Glint, after a brief moment of internal turmoil, lifted the flask up to Zero’s mouth and tipped him a measure. Zero angled his jaw to match, throat bobbing slow as he took his measure. The stuff was just as nasty going down his throat as it had been in his wound. “You drink paint thinner,” Zero said, pulling away, tongue flicking against his bottom lip. His voice was rough with it. 

“This came from a reputable bar, I’ll have you know,” Glint said, taking it back and returning the cap with a decisive flick of his wrist. 

“If you’re going to steal from a bar, get something better than that.”

Zero tied off the bandage and pulled the loose ends into a knot with his teeth. Threadbare fabric threatened to pull right apart as he did so. The alcohol wasn’t enough to distract from the discomfort of the wound, but he’d live. Tugging his gloves back on, Zero edged closer to the fire and hid his hands beneath the tarp. 

—

Glint didn’t like to bleed.

Niles left him to deal with his injuries without the luxury of a bottle of bad alcohol. It had been one thing, seeing him from the wrong side of the cell bars. It had been another to be face to face again, with broken words the only thing separating them. Words didn’t do anything to hold back a knife. 

Niles was still wiping his blade on a cloth when he emerged from the cellblock where Lord Leo waited. He’d done a clean job; his new cloak was still pristine. The shake in his hands was gone, replaced with cold. Niles didn’t feel it, or the blood on his fingers, or the blooming bruise on his ribs where Glint had managed a good kick before Niles had broken his wrist. There was an art to interrogation, just as there was an art to brawling in the street, and Niles felt he had more to learn on the former front. 

He had little to report to Leo. He rattled off what he could, at any rate, because it was his job to. 

“He tried to sway me back to his side,” Niles said, when his dagger was clean and his shoulders were heavy. “Pitiful, really. He thought he knew me.”


End file.
